I finished The Polygamist and now i have feelings…. Please don't read this if you don't want spoilers!
So i always heard about the polygamist on Tiktok and at first, i wasn’t going to buy into societal pressure to watch it. But then, the title caught me. Something about that name caught attention.. “The Polygamist”. So i thought to myself, what has a man done for him to earn this title and i bit the apple.. I watched the series and….And i have alot to say…
As a girl who grew up in an African household, we were always taught to live for men. From the day you are able to do house chores, it is often drilled into our heads to be amazing housewives..
We hear things like :
“if you don’t know how to cook, you will never find a husband”…
”if you cannot sweep and clean, you will never be a good housewife”.
“Keep your body holy”..
And the infamous one “Submit to your husband”
I always got the ick… Who are teaching the boys and what are they being taught? Are they being taught how to be good husbands to their wives? Are they teaching them to keep their own bodies holy???
Surely nobody taught Jonasi that he should keep his own body holy and be a good husband even when he had a good wife standing beside him.....
I started the show with great anticipation but i finished with something heavier. What stayed with me wasn’t the question of whether polygamy works or not… It was the people involved. Their loneliness.. Their desperation. Their hopes. And ultimately, their need to be chosen. Even as humans, we have attributes to animals that we don't know, especially in cases like this..
Let’s start with:
Essie..
I love to think of Essie Gomora as "The Elephant"
and i'll tell you why....
Elephants carry history, both generation and personal and they pass all that down. They never forget. One could offend an elephant and even after years of not seeing you, they will still remember exactly what you did to them..
Essie met Jonasi when she was young That was where everything started. She saw him when he was being bullied and she rushed in to save him because that’s what women are viewed as in the society. And by fighting his battled for him, Essie carried more than twenty years of trauma and heartbreak holding onto dreams of the life she wished for herself, Jonasi and the kids.....She carried Jonasi on her back for decades while he kept on with his life, only looking back at her when his reproductive member got excited...
Joyce
Joyce Gomora the Lioness.
I'm not saying this because she is strong....She shouldn't have to be, especially with a man who promised her heaven but took her to hell... She is strong because she built a kingdom around a weak king.. Yes the king was weak but she defended it fiercely when it felt threatened. Her anger, violence and refusal to disappear quickly feels very lioness-like...But what drew me to her story was how she was expected to stay calm and loyal to a man like that. He left her for a year and after their sham vow renewal, he decides to stay. Her mother even calls him "son", even after this man abandoned her own daughter with kids and a new born baby just for some fresh ass....This brings me back to my earlier point....Women are always taught to endure.....no matter what...
Matipa
Matipa Gomora the Peacock.....
In a peacock's mind, they are the prettiest thing to ever exist..Have you seen the way they walk especially after they spread their feathers? With so much pride....She felt like she was the exception...She felt like she needed to be the only one with Jonasi...She looked at Joyce and said "Well, why can't i have what she has?..Why can't i have the life and keep the man?"....But life doesn't work that way..Peacocks are oblivious to the fact that a lion will admire you from afar but once it's time to pounce, they go straight for the jugular....No mercy.....She thought that she was the plot twist, but she didn't know she was just repeating the cycle. An African proverb always stood out to me: The whip that was used in flogging the first wife will eventually be used in flogging the other women that follow.....
Lindani
Lindani Mbatha the Fox...
Now this one....She's as opportunistic and as sly as a fox. Unlike the others, she didn't seem interested in building or preserving an empire. To her, this was all a game and she didn't care about any other thing except her interests. A fox survives because it doesn't mistake survival for romance. Lindani grew up differently and she was of a different generation than the women who married Jonasi. So from the4 moment she told Menzi (Jonasi's son") that she loves powerful men, it was evident that this one was here for herself and herself only. I mean, it is one thing to sleep with your friend's father, but then to have her oblivious ass drive you to the airport so you could take a secret vacation with said father and have her think it was a random sugar daddy? Now that is just foul. But then again we havbe to remember that she was one of the few who understood that love wasn't going to save her,
Now these women are different in their own way but......They build themselves around a man who could never give either of them certainty. The tragedy is that none of them were ever in control of the one thing they wanted which was the man: Jonasi Gomora....He always managed to slip away and find a new plaything to amuse himself with..And as women, we were taught to accept such men back but how does that benefit us in the end?
